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Familypedia:Places
Here is a little discussion to get the ball rolling on how to do place names. Places are a way of grouping people and events. So one could ask, list all the people who were born in a particular place. Genealogy has some difficulties with places as for many people they are not known, or not known precisely. So we may only know that someone was born on the Island of Great Britain. Not which country they were born in, let alone know the town. Another problem with place names is that they change. Some places have different names over time, vis Constantinople which became Istanbul. What changes more frequently is the political boundaries. So the colony of New South Wales became a state in the country of Australia (after some staggering boundary changes). Here there is also confusion. Australia refers to both the country and the continent. However, when the country was first formed, about 1/3 of the continent was not included! A method I have seen used in wikipedia is to have links. So you can link to the previous or next version. However, I feel that this is too complex for a site that is at the end of the day only using places as a collection method. We could a hierarchy based on categories. However, we run into a name-space problem. How do we differentiate between say, people with the name Melbourne and places with the person's name Melbourne? As this is a set of pages on people, obviously the name Melbourne has prece dence. Prefixing a page name is a real-problem in the creation of categories as all the entries are grouped under the prefix. This means that it is better to have the highest level of entry at the end of the name. (Little endian in computer jargon.) 2005-04-04T15:54:44 User:Yewenyi :This note has been here for a while, but I just saw it the other day. I've created a proposal for a "place" template here -- User:Nhprman/placetemplate -- which I think I'm going to simply create and see if anyone has any edits to it ("Edit Boldly" is the Wiki motto, right?) since I've read no comments good or bad about it. You make some good points about naming. I think "Melbourne (place)" would be the best naming strategy, to avoid Surname issues. The discussion about places changing location is also a good one, but not as critical. As another example, in addition to yours, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts surely didn't encompass all the land it does now back in 1635, when many Englishmen and women were arriving. But it would be far too confusing to have a "Masschusetts (1630s)" and a "Massachusetts (1890s)" to differentiate the two. instead, I've included census data and perhaps should include "changes in name" "changes in territory" to the list of criteria as well, to address this issue. Nhprman 18:15, 1 February 2006 (UTC) ::Good work, folks. This page was not categorised and was therefore unlikely to be found! I found it by accident when looking for Category:Places. Some of it has been superseded by later developments but a few ideas remain worth extending. Anyone wanting to pursue it should copy some of it to a new forum. Robin Patterson 01:32, 17 October 2008 (UTC) Category:Places